Bellaire Construction

[IronTiger]

As by a slew of a few recent posts indicate, I visited Houston last weekend, but was appalled at the construction of Bellaire and Beltway 8. Not that there was construction, just in the terrible way they handled it. So they were working on the http://goo.gl/maps/LH9L1'>eastbound stretch. They closed off the eastbound lanes entirely, made the left hand turn lanes from the westbound into a new eastbound, and also added another eastbound lane next to that, creating four lanes with no turn lanes at all. The problem is that since they destroyed the trees in the median and cannibalized enough of it anyway (and they would, presumably, destroy the rest of it when they work on the westbound portion), why couldn't they completely remove the median for a turn lane (you know, running down the center of the road) while working on the eastbound? That way, when they work on the westbound, the new temporary lanes in the median become the new westbound lanes, and when that's complete they re-do the median?

 

That makes sense to me, because without a turn lane the traffic was far worse than it should've been.

 

 

- If there is already an existing topic on this, please merge -

[august948]

Bellaire has been a mess for the last 6 to 8 months.  I was on that section of road today, though since I know about the construction I got to my destination via a back road.  I was told that the whole thing is going to run about 2 years and expand Bellaire to 4 lanes in both directions.

[IronTiger]

Given that Bellaire was three lanes in each direction prior to construction, why not just take out the median (or drastically reduce it) and resurface the roads?